<h1>IT Department Primer</h1>
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<br><b>Fedora Linux</b>
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<br>Why Linux? Why not Windows?
<br>Well, for starters, Windows is very often pirated. If you have a conscience and know that somebody worked hard for that copy of windows and expected to be paid at the end of the day, you know that those people would not be very happy that other people use their software for free. 
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<br>Linux is free to download and use. People developed it without the expectation of getting paid. They get the respect of the software community, and the joy of service. And they're happy with that. It's called <b>Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)</b>. This means that people created it with the intention of making the world a better place by allowing other people to edit their programs to better suit the needs of the community, without financial compensation, as long as those people in turn also make their source code freely available. They do it because they themselves grew up on software written by others for free. And believe that the world is better off that way. They did it out of their heart - you could say the software is a labor of love. This is why (almost) nobody writes viruses for Linux. 
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<br>I choose Linux. It allows me to use software with a clean conscience. --Jasper
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<br><b>Downloading and installing Fedora Linux</b>
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<br>Visit http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora and click "download a Fedora ISO image".
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<br>You can choose between a DVD installer, or a live image cd. If your computer is 32 bit (most ordinary computers are), download one of the the i386 versions. 
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<br>A live image cd means that you can pop this cd into your cd drive, restart your computer and make it boot from the cd, and you'll have a test drive of Fedora Linux no sweat. That is, if the boot-from-cd works. But it doesn't come with a lot of stuff. 
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<br>A DVD installer is just that - an installer. It includes a lot of software, like OpenOffice and games.
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<br>What you do first is you download the cd or dvd image (this is a very big file) and the burn that into a CD or a DVD. The cd image for Fedora-13 is 675MB, and the DVD image is 3.1 GB. Then you burn that onto a CD or DVD. Use a download manager that allows pausing and continuing downloads. This kind of download is one that takes days. 
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<br>After a successful burn, you can test your new cd/dvd installer. Pop it into your CD/DVD drive, and restart your computer, setting the bios to boot-from-cd on the way. You should be successful after a few attempts. 
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<br>This is what the Fedora 11 desktop looks like.
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<br><img src=fedorascreenshot.jpg>
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<br>You won't see that many gizmos on the taskbar at the beginning though. 

